Storage comparison vs 25 years ago My server has been getting rather full from all the cartoon DVDs I have been ripping so I've been saving up my money to replace the 2TB drives in it with 8TB drives. The last time I spent this amount of money on hard drives all I got was a 5.25" full-height 350MB drive. Quite a difference 25 years makes! I didn't want to build a new server or do a new install from scratch, because it's a lot of work to configure a new server and this one...

You're probably reading this because you saw the #SaturdayMorningCartoons Periscope broadcast I did and you're wondering how I did it when not only don't TV stations show cartoons anymore, how I managed to find three TV stations showing classic cartoons! Some time ago I found an old Zenith CRT TV with knobs on it at a garage sale. There's no remote control on this kind of TV and the only inputs on it are separate VHF and UHF screw terminals. I thought having my retro...

The retro computing high score challenge this weekend is a special one! Unlike previous contests which were meant to inspire me to mess with computers in my collection that I'm not very familiar with and know very little about, this contest is about the Apple II which is the one I grew up with. 35 years ago in 1982 my family got an Apple II+ and in 1986 we got a IIgs. In 1990 I even worked on two different Apple IIe emulators for the NeXT computer. Because the Apple II is so special...

I've posted my code which uses the RMT peripheral on the ESP32 to control WS2812 RGB LEDs. The LEDs can be controlled from within a task without any flickering because the timing of the pulses is controlled by the RMT peripheral. As the RMT peripheral exhausts its buffer it sends an interrupt which then refills the buffer just in time. I tried to make the driver fairly generic and re-usable, but it hasn't been thoroughly tested. It currently sets up and manages the RMT directly since...

Because of how uncommon the Cauzin Softstrip reader was, I thought it would make a great starting point for another retro computing challenge . I don't think too many people still have them around. It also seemed like combining ancient 2D barcode technology with Bitcoin might be kind of interesting too. Encoding the private key directly into a Cauzin Softstrip was too obvious. I wanted to obscure the key in the barcode in some way that it could be solved, not necessarily with some kind of...